Bill Clementson bill_clementson@yahoo.com writes:
Even if the eventual goal is to replace all the functionality that is provided by ILM/ILISP, ILISP would provide more "short-term" benefits for the SLIME CL developer than ILM would.
That would have been one way, but we went the clean-room approach. We only use ILM to start Lisp and compile our server, and *inferior-lisp* as a debugging fallback. We've covered all the major features now, although there's plenty of hacking left to do to get all the details right and support everyone's favourite add-ons.
Starting from scratch means more work/fun, but it also gives us a fresh codebase. To an outsider, some of the code in ILISP is slightly terrifying :-), as in any program with such a long history. We also wanted to do most things differently and to have an environment more like the elisp one, so it would only give us a head-start in the short-term.
ELI really doesn't appeal to my hackstincts. From the web I can't even tell who wrote it, and most questions on groups.google.com seem to go without definitive answers. I downloaded my copy from Neil van Dyke's website, which says "Please do not pester Franz to support this packaging, lest they regret GPL'ing."
It looks like Franz did the least necessary to be allowed to link with Emacs under the GPL, and would be unlikely to let a dozen random hackers into their CVS tree :-) so that is a potential dead-end.
So I think our approach is pretty reasonable. We'll see how it goes. I'm even hoping we can tempt some of you fine hackers to have a play around on the dark side ;-)
And of course my views do not necessarily reflect those of the other SLIME hackers, but I hope this answers this thread's main question. Note however that this is almost entirely after-the-fact rationalization. Really, it was just too addictive to stop. ;-)
Cheers, Luke